This was the day before Christmas and I was seriously snowed in. Sitting here at the computer station, my only real contact. Oh I could have gone out, and the next day some of my more mobile friends began shuttling me to places. I didn't have to shop at all. I had no need for Christmas in my house, and I was well stocked with all necessaries. Nonetheless, this is where my poetry went.
Here is yet another return to that turning point moment in my life, yet another way to try to describe what happened to me back in the day.
How It Was Once
Infinity in cracks,
In the small gaps between ticks
Of the wild world clock.
I felt that gap once as clear,
As sure as my need for air.
I was eternity
And I died uncounted deaths
Before I returned.
And here again, yet another way the world ends.
How It Ends
The world ends sideways.
You and I will still argue,
That’s what we must do
Or else disappear.
Small and petty thoughts of you
Curl my brain waves up,
Drive out the gray thoughts
Of the dissolving last days,
Of “Where will we go?
Hurry
1 week ago
Well at least you make me laugh chritopher. Maybe my world is turning sideways. I love the poems, but don't understand them totally. So i wander off and find the snow print of the Raven from Ghost, which is totally incredible!! (thanks ghost),then.. i go to his blog, politics i totally don't understand. so.. maybe here through your poetry you let me peek through tne cracks and i see.. eternity. Thanks
ReplyDeleteAhhh, but which world?
ReplyDeleteInfinite possibilties....:)
"Infinity in cracks" -- I wish I'd said that! It reminds me of "To see the world in a grain of sand." Wish I'd said that, too.
ReplyDeleteWannabe to Christopher: your poetry turns the way I see things sideways. :-)
If you died uncounted deaths, you must have lived uncounted lives:-)
ReplyDeleteThe thought of infinity hurts my head...and yet there it is all around us...
Here's another poem about the end of the world I thought you might like.
A Song On the End of the World
by Czeslaw Milosz
Translated by Anthony Milosz
On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.
On the day the world ends
Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.
And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels' trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.
Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he's much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
No other end of the world will there be,
No other end of the world will there be.
oh god, my world feels sideways alot of the time xx
ReplyDeletejozien, poetry is highest level language use, no? It is the hardest to translate, one language to another. You have said about a couple Dutch phrases that there really is no translation. Perhaps talk of politics also requires so much assumed knowledge that you don't have. :)
ReplyDeleteMichelle, have you been skipping across the world lines again? I thought we had agreed you would stop that.
Karen, the cracks, the gaps are actually central to my belief about how it works on the planet. I say God has given us responsibility in the use of choice, what we often call free will. It seems to me the human world is filled up with territorial claims based on self centered free will. The space left are the gaps or cracks between the bounded territory of free will claims. How can God give us free will and then violate it very often? So He stays in the cracks - infinity in the cracks. If God ever acts on the world it is through these gaps, and very subtly, never ever violating free will. Or at least not until there is no other choice at all, which surely must occasionally happen. It is helpful if you want Him in your life to deliberately offer Him space, but even so, free will is not only privilege but responsibility.
{{{Faith}}} What a great gift.
Lisa, Indeed. Sideways is a common condition, so common that the world will end that way, just as Czeslaw Milosz wrote too.